...
Anyway, there also sometimes very good reasons not to build web-based applications. Aside from the difficulty of building rich clients beyond some gee-whiz JavaScript, the first thing I have to do with a web application is come up with a Web server somewhere (and pay for it plus bandwidth). This exposes me to security issues and I have to figure out how to get two computers to communicate with protocols instead of using method calls. It's just one more thing to break and I need to have an active network connection to use my application.
I'm really glad people are out there building cool mobile applications and web applications, but please don't deny me the right to use desktop applications have their place and please make it easy to build GUIs myself. So here is what I want: Oracle should fork off the applications framework, clean it up, and ship it as a separate product. The NetBeans IDE is already just an application that sits on top of this framework. Come on, folks. Let's put some effort into this application platform, to be named later. 
In closing, let me thank Geertjan Wielenga for giving the NetBeans workshop (an excellent instructor and nice guy) and Andreas Stefik for helping explain more about the NetBeans platform via his SodBeans IDE for the visually impaired.
Sam Harwell, Colin Bean, Udo Borkowski, Shaoting Cai and I are using NetBeans platform to build a new ANTLRWorks grammar IDE. More on that later.